The Sisters Antipodes Read online

  In Jenny’s room: a new radio and skis and her own bathroom, pink flowered wallpaper and bedspreads and a bedside table that wasn’t patched together like mine. I probably tried not to touch anything. I mentioned none of it in the diary. I also wrote nothing about how she’d adorned her dresser and desk, stuck medals and ribbons from horse shows all over. Or about the pictures she’d displayed, the same as had been sent to us but taken a minute earlier or later in the sequence; and framed private pictures of her own personal Paul. Also not a word about the things she’d traveled with from the Middle East to Asia to Canberra to New York, things she’d recently unpacked and run her fingers over and looked at and were hers. Nothing about the silver elephant whose halves came apart in the hands, or the bar-of-gold jewelry box inlaid with arabesques and the name Jennifer. Or about the paper she’d left on her desk, where she’d printed hard: Jenny Cummins. Jenny Stuart. Jenny the Greatest.

  In my diary I report that we unpacked, ate dinner, gave presents, and looked around Fifth Avenue, which seemed big and nice in the night. Nothing else. I went alone to Jenny’s room, Maggy to Patricia’s.

  In the photos taken that summer, pictures in which we now magically figure alongside that poised family, the girls stand close in new matching flowered culottes and platform sandals, what New York girls wore that summer, but I’m in cutoffs of pants I’d had for three years. I’d scissored off the legs and hemmed them and sewn patches to the worn bottom (“Have a nice day!”) — and this still seems proper; it’s my mother in me, and her mother, too; my mother has her first colander from 1957. But patched things, unmatching things, in New York were noticed, as seemed to be the facts that Maggy and I hadn’t brought much in our suitcases, and our swimsuits looked at least two years old, and we stared at the private bathrooms as well as the doorman and skyscrapers, so by our first morning, we were the poor girls come to visit. We were taken straight to Saks.

  A treat, a spree, it should have been wonderful, yet it’s one of those moments Maggy and I remember the same: grim. Giddy as starvelings after the sickly summer, we lunged among the mannequins and racks, while my father looked on, smiling, rocking back and forth on his heels. Jeans, spangled T-shirts: We clutched and gaped and fingered things, but Maggy couldn’t make a choice because it must be the right one. Buying clothes was so rare it mattered; we were not used to gliding into stores and getting what we liked so easily. And I couldn’t choose because suddenly, in a dressing room, trying on a glittery red T-shirt, my head began aching so much it seemed ready to crack, fossilized in the layers of the problem. If I put that shirt on and let them buy it, I’d be bought, too: Something important would have been surrendered. And to get anything so easily made it worthless: I wanted that glittery red shirt but could not have it given, not given by them. And beneath this was another problem, that to be newly clad and then eyed with approval meant that something had been wrong before. Whatever I lacked threaded back to my mother, the woman who had astonishingly not supplied us with our own face creams and lotions. The first thing he and Helen seem to have noticed: not even a part of me but of her.

  This was a shock, for the first time recognizing my own self by contrast and finding it not my own making. In New York with my father and Helen I first became my mother’s daughter, born of her flesh and drenched in her being and in the stories told about her. And in this household she was not welcome. Another thing my diary doesn’t mention but I remember: In photo albums, she’d been cut out.

  In the dressing room in the Girls’ Department at Saks, a red shirt half tugged over my staticky head, I went rigid with pride and despair. When I finally came out I said I’d buy the shirt myself. I had just enough money. My father threw up his hands and laughed and dismissed me, I flushed and grew more black and mute, Maggy stood paralyzed among the racks, arms draped in jeans, worried that she’d squander the treat and angry at being teased for this worry, and my father and Helen had probably never seen such a performance, and we were not only the poor girls but absurd.

  None of this appears in the diary, though, just a note about how nice D and H were and how Maggy got a pair of overalls, jeans, and two shirts and how much I liked the red shirt they bought me. Then how grand the Statue of Liberty was, and the Twin Towers, and the Met. My father is not mentioned beyond this; in those first two days his face never seems to detach from the shop windows on Fifth Avenue, the seats of the black Checker, or that other face, Helen’s, always paired with his, her dreamy, knowing blue eyes always drawing away the light of his. I don’t remember a minute alone with him. And after the second day, after lunch and looking at Chinatown and Wall Street, he left us with Helen and went to Penn Station to pick up the girls, and he does not appear in the diary again, as though he really did recede into a black hole, like Paul, his absence overwhelmingly present.

  There would be many first times I saw Jenny: at the Girls’ Grammar when we were four and five; now in New York; later, in Washington when she was seventeen; and in Sydney when I first flew back. Of these the only one I can see stark and clear is the last, Australian light streaming behind her when the door at Sydney International slid open. This time, in New York, when she first emerged whole from my father’s glossy photos, I picture her pacing fast and soundless down that long hall that was or wasn’t bamboo and finding me in her pink room, stopping dead in the doorway, out of breath and hot, letting one narrow hip jut against the jamb as she regards me. Or maybe Maggy and I waited in the vestibule for the brass elevator gates to slide open and the girls to step out, like the staff lined up to receive them. I know it was thought out, as every part of these visits had to be, and it was surely a task to have all these kids for two or three weeks while settling in a new city, among them two new girls who could pose problems. The first decision had probably been to make sure each pair of girls had two days undiluted with their own father. And now that those two were coming back, my father went alone to the station to meet them. Maybe because this made logistical sense, or maybe to assure them that although we were there, he was still their Daddy — or maybe, who knows, to debrief them.

  So Jenny either came striding down that bamboo hall and found me lurking, or we paced down it together, but when we were alone in her carpeted pink bedroom, one of the first things she said was, “It’s terribly important to Daddy, you know, to treat all of us exactly the same.”

  Which must have been easy, given how alike we were. She was just an inch or two taller, her prettiness midway between doll-like and wicked, with wavy brown hair and quick brown eyes and just enough new little breasts to put in a bikini, and hip bones beginning to open. I was a year behind, with stringy, wavy blonde hair and the body of a boy. But we were both smarty star girls, thin, fast, and mortally competitive, and as we looked at each other there was no forgetting our birthdays or names. I see her, once we’re alone in her room, being studiously nice, because I’m a guest, and Daddy’s daughter, and Mum’s stepdaughter, and Father’s former stepdaughter, and Nicholas’s half sister, and Tommy’s half sister, and so a sister, after all, but eyeing me, seeing whether I’d been sleeping in the right bed, and whether I’d put my things in the right drawer, and what sort of things I’d brought, and how many, and what I’d put in her private bathroom. She didn’t have to make clear that this pink room was hers, as were the apartment and New York and America — but then there was her father’s in Washington, where she and Patricia had just been. They looked like they’d been trampolining high and fast, and this had won them a gunshot laugh but no more. Maybe Jenny had learned that her father, unlike mine, did not treat everyone exactly the same. Maybe she’d learned that he liked a good race and especially liked the winner.

  So we’d race. We jostled in the car to Jungle Habitat, we raced bikes in Central Park, we competed at something called Make It, Wear It, Share It, where we did the first two but not the last. We jostled at Gimbels, where I bought washcloths for my mother; at the museum bookstore, where I bought bookmarks for my mother, and why the bloody he
ll, the girls said, did I think so much about my mother, did I have some sort of complex? Up and down hundreds of hot narrow stairs inside the Statue of Liberty (Patricia said “Well, if JANE could make it ANYONE could!” She’s never climbed a 17,000 foot mountain! P is getting me so mad it’s pathetic); at the planetarium (It was really fun, how the world could end); at Radio City Music Hall, where we saw the Rockettes and a movie called Night-watch with so much stabbing I ran out hysterical as the girls howled with laughter; at a friend’s pool: Everywhere, we jostled and raced.

  At that pool, in a dappled leafy garden in some Cheeveresque suburb, Jenny discovered my weakness fast. She swam behind me underwater, then clutched my leg with sharp fingers like teeth so that I screamed and kicked, or she suddenly lunged from the water before me with her eyes dead and mouth drawn down like a shark, before hurling herself back into the water gasping with laughter while I splashed in panic to the steps. Safe on the grass, then, she and I stood hip to hip, Jenny in a bikini and me in the blue one piece I’d worn my whole life, hurling darts at a bull’s-eye until we’d nearly hurled away our arms, to see who was better, more clever, more able, really worth something, really should win, in fact should be the only one there because we could not both exist. The diary never mentions either father.

  I say what appears in that gold diary and what doesn’t because of what this seems to show about consciousness and memory. You remember deeply a moment or the tone of a day, how it burned your skin or stabbed into your ribs. Yet at the time you say nothing, not even to yourself, so it exists without words and is like an animal dwelling mute in your tissues — the sort of memory that smell arouses. This layer of consciousness, a flash of image, a tearing sensation, settles deep beneath the ordinary things that are articulated at the time, and works itself to the surface only gradually, like lead paint burning through wallpaper. The battles with Jenny were comical because we didn’t know what they meant — or I didn’t, anyway. What lay buried and mute was the panic that after seven years my father seemed likely to slip out of reach while standing there, never closer. He might finally look at me but blink and see nothing. Or look at me but see only Jenny, or see only my mother, or hear not my voice but the America of Paul. And maybe the same had undone Jenny in Washington; we both still might not be visible. The only thing to do was slash in the water, find the other girl, and push her down.

  So each night, once my father and Helen had closed their door safely at the far end of the hall, we struggled. In the yellow room beside us, the two older girls whispered and told things, I don’t know what, their secretive S’s floating under the door, and between Patricia and Maggy never would be what there was between Jenny and me, because between them was not that problem of Paul; between Patricia and me there wouldn’t even be quite what there was with Jenny because we were too far apart and unlike, not mirrored, not fixed together night after night in twin beds.

  In her pink room, Jenny and I struggled. We arm wrestled on the edge of a bed, our faces red and eyes popping, teeth bared and lips drawn back, juddering — but Jenny was just enough bigger to win, which enraged me. We could both do cartwheels and limbers and competed, obsessive, flinging our bodies in T-shirts again and again hard on the burning carpet. We were boy-girls, slim, hysterical muscles. We both had compulsive rituals and fought to see who was worse: Jenny had to stand at her bathroom door and smile and wink at the tub, the shower curtain, the toilet, the sink, before turning off the light, still smiling. I had to lie in bed and run my eyes, without blinking, along each edge of the room, each line where the ceiling met each wall, down to each corner, along the edges of the floor, and if I blinked once I had to start over.

  “What the bloody hell are you doing!” Jenny said when she caught me. But I’d seen her at it, too, and ran to the bathroom and stood in the doorway and mimicked her smiling and blinking.

  “It’s neurotic, you know,” she informed me, looking pleased. “Mum says I’m neurotic.”

  She pronounced it nee-u-rho-tic, with breath, and that was the sort of thing that made clear she’d taken my country, too, she held it right in her mouth. She could just open her lips and I could see behind her white teeth my precious emu and kangaroo, now her own little pets, just as she could open her mouth and say sweetly, “Daddy,” taking him and my word and accent at once. And in her, too, behind her lowered lashes, was that lost place of mine, which she’d seen and touched and breathed just before coming to New York — Australia was hers, so I had to throw it away and hate it. I had to mock her Australian accent, and she had to mock my American one, because she looked at me and my mouth and saw the corollary of what I saw, and we fought violently over how to spell aluminum, which she pronounced aluminium, and when she ran off into the bamboo and came back shaking a British dictionary that spelled it her way, I was utterly defeated.

  Finally we were exhausted and collapsed on the twin beds. The radio played softly between us in the dark (You used to say, Live and let live …), distant sirens and car horns drifted in through the window, and for a sleepy moment we might have realized that we liked the same things, cartwheels and words and puzzles and insects, we were alike, maybe we liked each other. But then we remembered who we were, and that we could not afford this.

  Maybe that first visit she said it, or maybe the next. There were so many nights like that, so often when we lingered on the verge of being just two girls, not creatures embedded in this doubled family. The darkness opened up around us, winging, and maybe it only does that for girls of eleven or twelve: Pan girls, slight, strong, and desirous. You lie still on your twin bed and can barely keep from breathing your self out into that darkness in excitement and yearning. We lay side by side, a narrow, carpeted moat between us, those songs of 1973 blooming in the darkness, bearing us up, like floating. So much of your own passion is locked in old songs, they’re as powerful as scents, and when you hear them again they slip into your blood and imbue it again with the color and tang of all you so badly craved in those years, even if you couldn’t name it. We shut our eyes or gazed at the shadowy ceiling and sang or dreamed along. On my side was the open window, sounds of the city filtering in and blending in the air above me — the currents of nighttime city and song tugging outward, exciting, so that I lay on that bed like on a raft, life pulling me. I had that window opening to air; but on Jenny’s side was the door to the long bamboo corridor leading to the master bedroom, our paired parents, the chambered heart.

  So one night, on this visit or the next, Jenny said the thing that had moved through her mind and would now infect mine. I don’t think she even turned toward me, just gazed up at the ceiling in the darkness, perhaps stretched a bare leg into the air, and whispered:

  “Who do you think did it first?”

  I probably flipped over in bed and refused to answer, smashing the pillow around my ears while she laughed and speculated singsong to the ceiling. But her question sank like a chunk of pigment and slowly infused my blood: It couldn’t be thought about yet, but colored everything. She surely needed her mother to have done it first, to have chosen and won what she wanted; otherwise Paul had, and therefore had wanted to leave her mother and been able to leave Jenny, too. And I’d need my mother to have done it first, because otherwise my father had and had easily left me. For my mother to have done it first, Jenny’s father must have. For one of us to get what she needed, the other had to lose.

  To be or not to be wanted: the only measure of value.

  By the second day of that visit, something had overtaken me when I was near my father, and it would overtake me again and overtakes me still. A stupidity, a dullness that made me stare at the ground. My mind went flat; I could say nothing worth hearing. (Stop staring at the ground, Jane! Will you stop grimacing at the camera, please!)

  On outings, my father appointed the time for us to be bathed, dressed, and ready at the door, and he told us the order in which we should climb into or out of the car, the order in which we should sit. We were not to jostle. We wer
e called You lot. Will you lot be quiet back there! We were lined up for pictures on bicycles, or before a pond in Central Park, or on the Staten Island ferry. When not driving or lining us up, he kept at a safe, cheery distance, jingling the coins in his pockets, never quite catching my eye, smiling but glancing at his watch, then looking around for where his wife might have got to, hurrying off to her when she appeared.

  And she: She was beautiful and composed, crisp lace glimpsed beneath a blouse, smooth legs, tasteful sandals. She could cast her blue eyes this way or that, and everyone would watch. She was like Madame Merle; she knew things. Artists, books, philosophers, ideas. Hadn’t we read that yet? Didn’t we know? Degas, Diderot, Jasper Johns. Had I seen their work? Surely I’d heard of them? I was eleven and had heard of nothing. Her speech fell like a waterfall sparkling with names, names you were just trying to spell in your mind when out danced the next one, and beneath this shower I’d grow sullen and stupid, bitterly resolving to learn. Was that really how we’d been taught to set a table? Could it be true our mother didn’t buy us our own creams? Never mind: Helen would buy them herself. She took us to the Met and Frick and Guggenheim, she pointed out details in an Ingres sleeve or a shade of blue, she taught me how to etch and print, she bought us Napoleons and éclairs in cafés, and my mother did not do such things, my mother did not know such things, my mother did not hold on to husbands, and thinking those things — as I watched Helen glide through a door held open by a top-hatted doorman and step out onto sunny Fifth Avenue, and as I pictured my mother scrubbing a rug with a toothbrush — I felt sick with betrayal. Because I knew which woman I loved and was better. But I could see which woman I would rather be. My father’s eyes lay always happy upon her; between them ran a silvery leash. And witnessing this — from a low position, through cracks in a cave, a Gollum position — seeing a woman who possessed a value that drew to her what she desired, a woman who alone was gold: It was like seeing the mystery itself.